1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method for driving a plasma display panel.
2. Description of Related Art
Recently, with the trend of enlargement of the screen size of display devices, thin display devices have come to be demanded and various thin display devices have been realized for practical use. The alternating current discharge type plasma display panel is receiving attention as one type of such thin display devices.
In the case of a plasma display panel driven by a subfield method, if the number of subfields, into which the display period of one field is divided, is increased to express more half tones of luminosity, the pulse widths of the drive pulses become short, tending to cause erroneous discharge, making it difficult to obtain a good image quality.
This invention has been made to solve the above problem, and an object of the present invention is to provide a plasma display panel drive method with which a good quality image display can be realized even when the pulse widths of the drive pulses applied to the plasma display panel are made short.
This invention provides a plasma display panel drive method for driving a plasma display panel in which a discharge cell corresponding to a pixel is formed at each intersection of row electrodes corresponding to each of a plurality of display lines and column electrodes aligned to intersect the abovementioned row electrodes. In the plasma display panel drive method, the abovementioned display lines are grouped into a plurality of display line groups, and a reset process, by which reset discharge is made to occur to initialize all of the abovementioned discharge cells to an emitting cell state, is executed only in the first of a plurality of display period divisions that comprise a unit display period for an input video signal. In each of the abovementioned display period divisions, a pixel data writing process is executed by which each of the abovementioned discharge cells is set to either the abovementioned emitting cell state or a non-emitting cell state in accordance with pixel data corresponding to the abovementioned input video signal, and each time the abovementioned data writing process for the abovementioned discharge cells belonging to one display line group among the abovementioned display line groups is completed, an emission sustaining process by which sustained discharge is caused to make the abovementioned emitting cells belonging to the abovementioned one display line group emit light is executed.